Abstract:

BACKGROUND: In June 1998 the World's leading wireless device manufacturers and Psion formed a company called Symbian. The target of the company is to set the EPOC operating system as a de facto standard for PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) devices. The Symbian partners have traditionally had very different look and feel in their devices. To maintain the individual look and feel in the EPOC devices, there has grown a need for an adaptive solution. A solution that will enable customising the look and feel to meet the manufacturer-specific requirements.PDA itself limits the implementation of the system. The amounts of memory and display size are often scarce in a PDA device. Maximal allowed power consumption and restricted processor speed are in these devices a limiting factor. PURPOSE: To find out the possibilities for implementing a look-and-feel customisable system by means of a graphic library. The target was set to a system that would enable meeting the look-and-feel requirements of different manufacturers in a binary compatible and environment independent way.METHODS: To identify a convenient solution, a number of software technical alternatives were studied. RESULTS / DISCUSSION: The features that were emphasised in the analysis were flexibility and clarity of the solution. Only one approach was able to excel in both. To verify the advantages of the solution a confirmation note component was designed by means of the approach.In implementation the alternative that was chosen proved its capabilities in implementation of a customisable look and feel for PDA devices. It divided the system logically into two parts: one that implements the functionality for the system and the other that offers the licensee a tool for customising the look and feel.In the end of this thesis a generalisation is presented. The features of look-and-feel customisabil-ity that have been observed in the earlier part of this thesis will be extended to offer principles for customisability of a general user interface component.Despite of the principles here presented it is essential to remember that there is no general solution in software engineering that could be applied effectively without exceptions. The suitability of an approach has to be always casespecifically analysed.